Downloading streamed videos, YouTube videos in Safari

Ever wanted to keep a copy of a YouTube video on your computer? Or maybe download a stream in its entirety so you can watch it later, offline or not?

Here's the solution.

You will need the Safari browser for Mac. I'm not sure if the Windows version works the same, I don't see why it wouldn't. You'll also need VLC media player or any other Flash video player.

In Safari, go onto the website you want to take the stream from. Window > Activity (or simply Cmd+Opt+A).

You'll see an image similar to the one below. You're looking for a file with a size of a few MB (a pretty large file, I guess). This will be your video file if you've guessed right.

Double click it and it will start downloading. You can check your downloads by going to Window > Downloads, or simply by pressing Cmd+Opt+L. It will download to your selected folder. For YouTube videos, when you start downloading the file it'll show it as get_video.

Go into your folders and locate the file. For most websites (not including YouTube), it will be in *.flv format (Flash video) already. Play it in VLC.

Now, if this is a YouTube file, you'll need to add the file extension flv to the newly downloaded file. Make sure "Show file extensions" is selected in your Finder prefs.

And there you have it!

If you're downloading a series off of YouTube, you can order them in the right order in a VLC playlist and play them one after another, and they'll play as if they were one file only.